Power Converters
by StarWings009
Summary: When Luke Skywalker left Tatooine, he never spared a thought for that order he'd placed at Tosche Station. After all, what use were power converters when you were on the run from the Empire? But Merl Tosche, it seemed, would hold an order until it was picked up, and was always waiting to collect...


Anchorhead hadn't changed much in four years. Nor had the Weary Traveler Cantina, the center of life in the small settlement

The dartboard on one wall was new. So was the viewscreen on another wall. He thought he could see a few pieces of the old one scattered around. The patrons were pretty much the same group, a little more worn and tattered by time. The place was dirtier, certainly, and the layout of the furniture was noticeably different. But, by and large, it was the same cantina Luke and his childhood friends had visited hundreds of times in their youth.

His youth. It was a strange thought. By anyone's standards, he was still quite young at twenty-three standard years old, but for him, _youth_ was a long time ago. A time before he'd been drawn into the war. Before he'd met Artoo, Threepio, Ben, Han, Chewie, and Leia.

 _Leia._

His gaze briefly settled on the dark-haired young woman sitting beside him. As usual these days, she was silent and withdrawn, the dark circles under her eyes standing out in stark contrast to her pale skin. In contrast to her usual immaculate tidiness, her hair was slipping out of its braid and cascading over her face, and there were soot stains on both her clothes and skin. He clenched his mechanical hand, remembering that he and Chewie looked and felt just as bad. Bespin had been hard on them all. He and Chewie had lost a brother, and Leia…Leia had lost something more.

Initially, he'd competed with Han to win her affection, but at one point, when he realized he was winning—not a difficult feat given her opinion of Han at the time—he realized it just felt so _wrong_. The very thought of a romantic relationship with Leia made him feel physically sick.

So he'd backed off quietly and carefully, leaving Han to try and, until recently, fail to win her heart. It had brought a curious sense of relief when she'd visited him on the _Redemption_ after Bespin and apologized for what had happened in the Echo Base medcenter. As it turned out, she was also disgusted by the thought of having those sort of feelings for him, and it was an even stranger sense of relief when he told her that he felt the same way, and she told him that she knew. That had been one weird conversation. In his admittedly limited experience, people usually opened up to each other about how they loved each other, not how they were mutually disgusted by the thought of loving each other.

He looked past her to Chewie. The hulking wookiee sat in silence, eating his meal with the kind of slow, methodical approach that suggested he was only doing it out of routine rather than to sate his hunger. Luke wasn't sure exactly how Chewie viewed him and Leia. He cared for them, that much was obvious, especially since he'd extended his Life-Debt to include them as well as Han a year into the war. Luke knew that _he_ considered the wookiee to be family, and suspected Leia did as well, but for the most part, Han's enigmatic co-pilot remained just that—an enigma. Wookiee culture was so far removed from anything Luke or Leia had experienced, and they had no way of truly understanding it.

A door banged open and the mood of the room shifted. A current of anticipation and wariness crackled through the Force. Surreptitiously, Luke looked up to see Merl Tosche, the ageing mechanic who ran Tosche station, lumber into the room with a datapad in his hand, a pair of hulking men holding shock sticks following him. A quick glance to his left confirmed that Leia had also picked up on the shift and lifted her eyes from her drink.

Then the tension snapped with a single shouted word.

"SKYWALKER!"

Luke had his hand on his blaster in a heartbeat. Tosche glared around the room, scrutinizing each booth and table, then his gaze alighted on the massive form of Chewie. And then slid down past Leia to focus on Luke. The old man swore in Huttese and began lumbering towards them, his thugs close behind.

Leia went to level her blaster at him, but Luke stopped her with a hand on her arm and a careful glance, sliding his own blaster free of its holster beneath the table and indicating that she should do the same.

"We-eel, what do we have here?" Tosche drawled, coming to a stop in front of their table. "When I heard little Luke Skywalker had come back to town after spending the last four years gallivanting across the Galaxy while his family lay moldering on the sand outside their burning home, I couldn't believe my ears."

Leia shot him a shocked glance, but Luke didn't take his eyes from Tosche. "What of it?"

Tosche slammed the datapad down on the table. "Forty kriffing power converters, that's what! Four years I've been holding this order for you, Skywalker! Four kriffing years!"

Leia, who'd been raised as a Princess of House Organa of Alderaan and was nearly always the very picture of royal decorum and poise, spewed her drink across the table and burst out laughing.

Luke gaped at him. "What? Four years? Are you kidding me?"

Chewie was chuckling now, a deep rumble that set the glasses vibrating ever so slightly.

"You know I always hold an order for pickup!" Tosche snapped. "And you're not the first deadbeat to try skipping the planet to avoid the debt! The interest'll get you in the end, and if it don't, then my boys will!"

Luke took the datapad and blanched at the sum of credits displayed. "Look, Mr Tosche, I wasn't trying to avoid the debt, you know me…"

"Hah! I know you alright!" Tosche snarled. "A lazy layabout, always skipping up and down Beggar's Canyon, no stomach for a good day of hard work! Your uncle would be rolling in his grave—if you'd bothered to give him one!"

It wasn't the accusation of laziness that got to Luke, even though he was bursting to tell Merl Tosche that if he thought moisture farming was hard work, he'd clearly never fought in a seemingly never-ending guerilla war against a vastly superior enemy, always looking over your shoulder, never safe from one day to the next. No, it was the jab about his family. "I'd like to see you try," he growled, jumping to his feet and jabbing Tosche in the chest with his mechanical hand. The thugs raised their shock sticks, but Leia's blaster came up faster. "I'd like to see you try to dig a grave out of sandstone, try to manhandle the burning skeletons of your family into it, all the while fearful that a hunting party of Sand People would swoop down on you, or the murderers would come back to finish the job. Don't you dare talk to me about them. Don't you dare talk down to me like I'm still a whiny kid more interested in his skyhopper than his family."

Tosche looked down at Luke's hand, obviously registering that it was cold metal rather than warm flesh and bone. He gulped and looked back up at Luke's furious expression. "B-be that as it may, you still owe me—"

"I don't want any power converters," Luke said. "I don't need them, and your bully boys aren't going to intimidate me into paying you. You and your thugs are nothing— _nothing_ —compared to what I've faced."

Tosche looked down at the blaster clenched in Luke's other hand. Then up at hard sapphire eyes as cold as the depths of space. "Fine. Don't expect me to hold any more orders for you," he blustered, then turned and almost sprinted out of the cantina. Luke glared around the room at the gaping onlookers, whose eyes shifted nervously to his blaster, then everyone in the room suddenly became very focused on suddenly loud and boisterous conversations.

Luke sat down with a sigh, holstering the blaster and picking up his glass. "Merl Tosche. Basically runs this place. Notorious for sticking to deals—though I never imagined he'd hold that order for so long."

"Luke…" Leia said quietly, "are you alright?"

Images of the burning farm flashed through his mind. His last words to his uncle, spoken in anger. His last feeling towards the man, frustration. And then that gaping emptiness. "As much as I can be, Leia," he replied just as quietly.

No more words were needed. They'd both lost too much to be truly _alright_.

"Just one thing, though," she mused.

"Yeah?"

" _Forty_ power converters?"

"I was going to upgrade my landspeeder!" Luke said defensively.

"What, you were trying to achieve escape velocity?" Leia laughed. "Did you also remember to seal the cockpit? Add a life-support system? A hyperdrive, perhaps? Is that _really_ how you planned on getting to the Death Star to rescue me, before Han came in to save your ass?"

"I—I—"

Her high, musical laughter mixed with Chewie's deep rumbles, and soon, Luke found himself laughing as well. It wouldn't last, that one moment of light and happiness, but perhaps it didn't need to. Perhaps the mere fact that they still _could_ laugh was enough.


End file.
